Springboard

37

Thorn wasn’t exactly sure what he’d expected, but whatever it had been, Marissa’s new townhouse wasn’t it.

The place was in a nice enough neighborhood, in a row of two-story condos that looked pretty much the same — not rich folks, not poor, a little above the middle of middle-class. No yard to keep up, at least not in front, just a sidewalk on the street and a couple of small trees in big pots.

There was an alarm system, and one that needed both a thumbprint and vox-ID to unlock the door — which appeared to be steel painted to look like wood. He also noticed wrought-iron grills over the windows, very artistic, but serving as bars to keep all but the most serious of would-be burglars out.

Thorn’s security wasn’t bad; Marissa’s was better.

“What do you have in here, gold bullion?” he asked, as she opened the door.

“Something better, I think,” she said.

When he got inside, he saw what she meant:

There were two paintings in the living room. They were fairly large, five feet by three or so, on opposite walls, directly facing each other — oils or acrylics, Thorn couldn’t tell for sure.

One was of a large, muscular black man, shirtless, in stained overalls half held up by one strap, with a red handkerchief in a front pocket, sitting in an unfinished wooden glider hung by iron chains under a wide front porch. There was a thick book on the swing’s seat next to him. The man was sweaty, and looked very warm; the painter had captured a kind of nobility in his position, as if he were royalty, but a king who worked with his hands. He had a smile that Mona Lisa would envy.

Across the room, the second painting was of a black woman. She was lean, dark, and naked, one arm stretched wide to show a muscular definition, her breasts high and small, belly flat. The artist had shaded the figure so that her sex was in deep shadow, barely hinted at. Her hair was plaited in long braids that flared and reached to the middle of her back, hung as though a strong wind stirred them to her right. She stood against a background of green land, blue mountains, and a cloudy sky, with the sky going darker and into a star field behind her head.

Both of the subjects looked to be about thirty, though it was hard for Thorn to judge — black people had always seemed to him to age better than paler-skinned folk.

“The artist is Rick Berry,” Marissa said. “You might have seen his work on some book covers, he has done a lot of that.”

“Impressive,” Thorn said. He knew quality when he saw it, and this was definitely that.

He looked at her. Caught a hint of something in her smile. “What else?” he said.

“The man is Amos Jefferson Lowe. The woman is Ruth Lewis Jackson Lowe.”

Thorn nodded. “Your grandparents, on your father’s side.”

“No points for that one, Tommy.”

He smiled. “I think my grandmother would spin like a gyroscope in her grave if she knew I had a picture of her without clothes on my wall.”

“Not mine,” she said. “My mother’s parents died when I was a child — a car accident in Alabama — a drunk in a truck crossed the centerline and hit them head-on. But Grampa and Grandma Lowe tried to make up for that. Amos was a machinist at a mill who read Shakespeare and published articles about the Bard. Ruth taught third grade for forty years, but had been a champion runner in her youth — held the state record in the mile for twenty years after she graduated. Salt of the earth — with a few other spices mixed in.”

Thorn nodded.

“They decided when I was a little girl that whenever I had a birthday, or for Christmas, or other special occasions, they weren’t going to give me toys or clothes, they would give me adventures. They took me to museums; to see sailing ships; to the tops of tall buildings where I could look down upon the world. The summer I was ten, we visited a diamond mine in Arkansas. At eleven, the Carlsbad Caverns. At twelve and thirteen, the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. I took lessons and scuba-dived the oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico when I was sixteen. When I graduated from high school, they paid for a trip to Spain; when I graduated from college, they sent me on a month-long walkabout in Australia.”

She paused, remembering, a small smile on her face.

“My grandmother taught me how to shoot a.22 rifle, how to skin and cook a squirrel, and how to run within my breath. My grandfather taught me how to ride a bicycle, to call quail right to the back door of their house, and how to strip down a lawn mower engine. And also about sonnets and plays. He did a mean Othello.”

She paused again. “I can’t imagine any better grandparents than Amos and Ruth. These pictures capture their essence for me. Who they were — who they still are.”

He looked at her, eyebrows raised. “Around here?”

“They live on a little farm down in Georgia. You’ll get a chance to meet them pretty soon. I thought you’d want to know a little bit about them first.”

Thorn felt a thrill, an almost electric sensation flash up his body — this conversation meant something more than family history. It took his breath away for a moment as he understood just what it did mean.

Then he said, “So, now is it okay to bring up that subject I wasn’t supposed to talk about?”

She grinned. “I like a man who can keep up. Go ahead.”

“You want to get married?”

“To you? Yes.”

He thought his face might break, he grinned so big.

Later, when they were lying on the floor between the two pictures in a state of dress the same as the painting of her grandmother, Marissa said, “So, how’s the thing in China going?”

“In the grand cosmic scheme of things, it really doesn’t matter to me right now. Not in the least. Not at all.”

She laughed. “You are waay too easy, Tommy.”

He laughed with her. She was smart, funny, and beautiful, and she wanted to be with him.

He didn’t see how it could get any better than this.

The rendezvous was at the warehouse where Locke waited, but even with what was supposedly an unbreakable cipher program in Wu’s and Locke’s telephones, the general never said anything that could identify them, or specific times and places, over a wireless connection. What was not spoken could not be intercepted.

Wu was in his command car, and the driver was one of his hand-selected elite robbery team. Too bad the man would be dead soon. He would last longer than some of the others — all the way to Taipei, but then, alas, he would have to become food for the worms. Regrettable, but necessary. The new Wu did not need any such baggage.

True, the People’s Government would want his head, but he had already begun making sure that anything they said about him would fall on less-than-interested ears in Taiwan. Of course they would offer all manner of slanders. He would be, after all, a defector. And if his new friends believed the story of the theft of millions — and certainly some of them would — one could buy a lot of goodwill with enough well-placed bribes. It was a very large pie, after all, and the reason he had baked it was to share it.

There were things that money could not buy, but poor and venal officials were seldom among these things. There was always a man who wanted more than he had, and you had but to find him and determine his price to make him yours.

Wu glanced at his watch. He was a little nervous — who wouldn’t be? His life was about to change, very much and forever, no matter what happened. If things went badly, then he would suffer. Prison would be the best for which he could hope, death a much more likely end. But if all went well — and it should — then Wu would be one giant step farther down the road to greatness, with the sun shining and not a tiger in sight.

He had found one weakness in the technological might of the United States. Shing was captured, and that secret lost to Wu, but what he had found once, he could find again, with enough money and power at his beck and call.

Wu was a man with large mountain ahead of him, and in his heart, he knew he would not fail to reach and climb it. To stand in the dragon’s lair…

He smiled as the driver honked at a wooden cart crossing the road ahead of them, a cart with automobile wheels and bald tires on it, being drawn by a pair of oxen, driven by an old man in a straw coolie hat. Here they were, in the twenty-first century, in a city thick with all the aspects of modern civilization, just down the hill from the Ritz Hotel, where a good, but not the best, room would cost HK$2,000 a night, and still such things as ox carts were not only possible, they were not even uncommon.

Wu laughed. He was on his way to becoming the man he was always destined to become, a man of the future, and here he was slowing for something out of history. How amusing.

Life did not get any better than this.